Maryland Has a Bad Beer Bill on Tap

First the good news: The Maryland House of Delegates just passed a bill that would quadruple the amount of beer that breweries are allowed to sell in their taproom. Now the bad news: Those brewers will have to try to squeeze those sales into less time, because the bill would also require them to stop serving by 9 on weeknights and by 10 on Fridays and Saturdays. (Depending on where they’re located, they’re currently allowed to stay open til either midnight or 2 a.m.) The bill also bans the brewers’ taprooms from selling other companies’ products.

In other words, it takes away a lot more than it gives. The aim of all this, apparently, is to protect traditional bars and liquor stores from competition.

This had been one of three rival beer bills in the legislature. The best one would have loosened the restrictions on how much beer the brewers could serve without adding those new controls. The other measure was a cronyist proposal that essentially would have carved out a special privilege for a Guinness brewery coming soon to Baltimore County, upping the amount it could serve in its taproom without offering a comparable increase elsewhere. (Speaking as a local: I’m all for bringing more Guinness to the area, but I’d like the rest of the state’s beermakers to have the same rights.) Guinness had actually endorsed the more sensible legislation, but it had this one ready too, just in case. Beer writer Liz Murphy called it the “cover your ass bill.”

The legislation will now go to the Maryland Senate, where hopefully it will die. If these new rules do become law, Guinness will be able to handle them, but they’ll kneecap a lot of smaller businesses. It’d be a double tragedy: a bill so bad that it drives you to drink, but which also takes drinks off the table.